


Panning for Gold

by firesonic152



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Amnesia, Gen, Post-Fall of Overwatch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 14:44:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17347130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firesonic152/pseuds/firesonic152
Summary: The dog tags hanging around his neck had helpfully informed him that his name was “John Morrison,” but it didn’t sit well on his tongue. It wasn’t his name, he decided after a few minutes of saying it to the hazy mirror. If he had been “John Morrison” before, he was no longer.That begged the question, then: who was he?





	Panning for Gold

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a zine about a year ago that didn't work out. Jack was confirmed gay earlier today, so it seemed like the right time to bring this out of storage.

It was dark when the soldier arrived at the cemetery. A light drizzle was beginning to pepper the graves, the threat of an oncoming downpour whistling in the wind.

He knelt before the headstone, swiping his thumb over the engraved letters and smudging a raindrop across the name. It shone wetly under the red light of his visor, like a thin streak of blood.

 _John Morrison_ , it read. He traced the letters, willing the name to come back to him.

When he reached the end of the _n_ , the name had not moved. It remained there, stubbornly carved into the marble.

Heat flared under his skin and his fist came down onto the headstone with a sharp _crack_ that lost its edge under the rain. He took a moment to study the spidery scars now slithering out from the center, fracturing the letters apart into something unrecognizable. Like looking in a shattered mirror.

* * *

 

The soldier remembered nothing before waking up, buried under rubble with powdered concrete in his lungs and a name skittering away from his bloodied fingertips.

He had watched his hollow, beaten face in the mirror as he stitched up the gash splitting it down the middle and realized he did not know who he was. It was almost an afterthought, a detached awareness that he was knitting together the skin of a stranger. Only when he had cut the thread and began scrutinizing his handiwork did the significance of this become apparent.

 _Amnesia_. It didn’t strike a chord of fear like he might have thought; instead, it collected into an icy sphere in his stomach and sank to the bottom, engulfed by the persistent pain from his wounds.

This sense of calm either came from the fact that he had survived a catastrophe and could deal with anything at this point, or his own mind was anesthetizing itself as a defense mechanism so he wouldn’t go into debilitating shock. He decided not to examine it too closely and moved on.

The dog tags hanging around his neck had helpfully informed him that his name was “John Morrison,” but it didn’t sit well on his tongue. It wasn’t _his_ name, he decided after a few minutes of saying it to the hazy mirror. If he had been “John Morrison” before, he was no longer.

That begged the question, then: who was he?

He could do an internet search later. First, he took stock of his few possessions: a stained and shredded coat, armor dented beyond repair, a scuffed up but working pistol, and the tags.

 _Oh_ , he realized as he took the pistol apart to clean away the grime from the wreckage, fingers moving on their own. He was a soldier.

* * *

 

According to the pictures, Strike Commander Morrison used to be handsome.

There were endless photos of him – online, in magazines, on posters – all sparkling with charisma and airbrushed to perfection, like a page out of a comic book.

Sharp cheekbones, strong jaw, golden hair. Bright blue eyes to match his bright blue uniform, pressed and imposing over broad shoulders.

The soldier looked in the mirror and all he could see were the dark circles under his eyes, his grayed and thinning hair, the gaunt expression and hunched posture of a man who had given everything only to receive nothing in return. All punctuated by the unforgiving scar that ran through the center of his face like a crack in a crumbling marble statue.

* * *

 

The articles used to say Strike Commander Morrison was a hero. They called him an inspiration, a beacon of hope, a pillar of strength.

At some point, they started to label him a villain. They said he was a liar, a self-important idiot; at best a foolish puppet of the powers that be, and at worst a mastermind hiding a monstrous core behind a pretty face.

They were all just words in the end; descriptions of a caricature of a man. It was like trying to identify a person using only the chalk outline of their body on the floor.

He smoothed his thumb over the string of numbers on his dog tags and wondered if it was pathetic that he had come to identify more with these cold digits than the name printed neatly above them.

The thought gave him pause. He studied the tags, tracing the “0076” with his eyes. He had never seen the number in any of the news reports. He had apparently kept it close to his chest – literally and figuratively – so it was a code not just _anyone_ would know.

Maybe it meant something.

* * *

 

He hand-sewed the number from his dog tags into the back of his jacket with the same needle he had used to close the laceration on his face. The stitches were huge and sloppy, with tiny patches of red in places from accidentally pricking his fingers.

He nearly smiled when he held the finished product up to the light, scar tugging insistently at the corner of his mouth as he eyed the inconsistent skipping of the thread and odd wrinkle cutting through the fabric of the “6.”

If this shot in the dark didn’t get him any answers, at least he had learned he was not a tailor.

* * *

 

After raiding the abandoned Watchpoint Colorado’s armory, he headed down to Mexico. Between the shady power company LumériCo and the gangs of Los Muertos thugs roaming the streets, the city of Dorado was crawling with high-profile criminal activity. All he had to do was break into LumériCo’s new camera-infested power plant and get into a few scuffles with Los Muertos before the media was on him.

He hid his face, but the bright red “76” on his back did not go unnoticed. Almost immediately, the news christened him “Soldier: 76” and speculated about his true identity.

He didn’t pay much attention to what they said about him. The only thing that mattered was getting the number out there.

Someone was going to notice. There had to be _someone_ who could connect the dots and match a name to this masked vigilante. Hopefully, it would be someone willing to talk.

In the meantime, LumériCo was still shipping out energy systems to oppressive powers like Vishkar, and opportunistic Los Muertos goons were stealing little girls’ purses. He had a lot of work to do.

* * *

 

The rain had gotten worse as he knelt there, watching the water collect in the fissures of the headstone and run through the splintered name like cold veins.

The barrel of a shotgun pressed to the back of his head. He waited for it to fire and scatter his brains across the marble, but it simply waited behind him in a wordless threat.

If it were a LumériCo assassin, he would have been bleeding already. It had to be someone responding to the number.

“Well?” came a rasping voice. “Don’t you have something to say?”

The soldier tipped his head forward an inch, water running in thick streams down his forehead and over his visor. “Like what?”

The gun shoved into his skull, accompanied by an angry hiss. “Don’t play coy with me. I know it’s you under that mask, Jack.”

His breathing stuttered and caught in his lungs at the familiar nickname. He was right, then. “76” meant something.

Though, based on the possibility that he could be shot any second, perhaps the number carried a little more baggage than he had thought.

He stood and the gun followed his movement.

“That’s what I was going to ask you,” he said. “Whose face this is, under the mask. Because I don’t remember.”

When he didn’t receive a reply, he turned around. Between the dark and the downpour, all he could make out of the figure before him was the silhouette of a hood and a long, black coat. The visor wasn’t much help either – only informing him of a strange heat signature – so he took it off, baring his face.

“Who am I?” he asked.

The barrel of the stranger’s shotgun pressed to his forehead. He didn’t flinch.

“You knew it was me,” he prompted. “You knew my number.”

The stranger’s grip on the shotgun relaxed.

“Who am I?” he asked again, urgent.

The stranger laughed, low, like it wasn’t meant to be heard. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I thought I did.” The gun seemed to melt, dripping away with the rain into nothing. “I don’t think even _you_ knew, by the end.”

Lightning flashed in the distance, bursting off a pale, owl skull mask, then falling back into darkness.

“But I still knew it was you, Jack Morrison,” the stranger said, amusement rippling like static through his voice. “I’d know those harebrained, self-sacrificial stunts anywhere.”

And just like that, he dissolved into the sheets of rain and vanished.

 _Oh_ , Jack realized distantly as he bent to pick up his pulse rifle and slung it over his shoulder. _It was just me all along_.


End file.
